Whitney
Rule Number Thirteen: Commit to the backstory and stick to it at all costs.
If someone had asked me to write a bananapants list of the most unlikely people I could run into tonight, the groom from the last wedding I crashed wouldn’t even end up in the top one hundred. And yet here he was, marooned on the landing outside Henry’s apartment and proclaiming the end of his marriage.
Over the past month, the realization that I’d have to tell Henry the truth about my presence at that wedding had crossed my mind more than once. He often brought up Mason—though he hadn’t mentioned Florrie since that first night at my place—and I knew that if this thing we had going continued, I’d find myself in a sticky situation where I wouldn’t be able to control how the truth came out.
A situation just like this one.
Mason staggered to his feet, a half-empty bottle of dark liquor pinched between his fingers. He tried to clap Henry on the back, but swung wide and slapped the door instead. He was very, very drunk.
“Not that I don’t love to see you, man, but would it have killed you to call first? Maybe fire off a text?” Henry asked, looking his friend up and down. “It’s not like you were in the neighborhood.”
Mason struggled to maintain his footing, wobbling until he found the wall and leaned up against it. “Wanted it to be a surprise.” He lifted his arms. “Surprise! My wife never wanted to be married and now I’m getting divorced.”
It didn’t seem like my place to mention it, but we were still on the landing outside Henry’s apartment. I wasn’t especially concerned about the neighbors listening in—Dr. Emmerling lived downstairs and an anesthesia fellow I didn’t know too well was on the first floor—but we could be having this conversation in private. It also occurred to me that we needed to park Mason in a safe spot before he tripped over his own feet and fell down the stairs.
“Give me that. I think you’ve had enough.” Henry plucked the bottle from Mason’s grip, frowning at what little remained. “What happened?”
“Came home early from an expedition when the weather turned on us. Found her in bed with some guy.” He jerked a shoulder up which had the effect of dislodging him from the wall and sending him stumbling into both of us. “She said she didn’t want to be confined to one person. She thought it might’ve been different after the wedding, but it wasn’t and she wished we’d never gone through with it. That’s what happened.”
An arm around Mason’s arm while Henry grabbed his waist, I jerked my chin toward the door. “Why don’t we head inside? Away from the stairs?”
“And who are you?” Mason asked, staring like this was the first he’d noticed me. Not that I minded. His blood had a lot in common with rubbing alcohol right now. He leaned in close and rested his head on top of mine. “You smell fancy.”
“That’s Whitney,” Henry said, yanking his friend away from me. “Find some fucking manners. Don’t think I won’t leave you out here to sleep it off.”
“I’d tell you to stay far away from relationships, but I know your style, Hazlette.” Mason turned his unfocused eyes on me. “Sorry, honey, but there’s no way in hell you’re getting this one to settle down. He goes for the girlfriend experience about once every five years and then remembers he’s not built like that. My advice? Get out before he goes into self-destruct mode. Especially with someone like you. He doesn’t know the first thing about fancy women.”
Holy fucking ouch.
Henry unlocked the door and shoved his friend inside before I could even register the sharp, twisting pain of those words.
After slamming the door behind him, Henry grabbed the lapels of my coat and pulled me into him. “Listen to me,” he ordered. “Don’t believe a word of what he just said. He’s rocked off his ass and lashing out because he’s hurt, and none of it is true.”
I peered up at him. I wanted to trust him. I wanted to believe. But Mason’s words plucked at the worst of my insecurities. I worked really hard at intimidating away all of my soft spots yet it only took a few slurred comments from a relative stranger to send it all crashing down. “None of it?”
He locked his arms around my shoulders and held me close. “You know what you know, Whit.”
For tonight, that would have to be enough. After everything with his team and now Mason, my problems weren’t the priority. They couldn’t be. I could do this. I could push through. I didn’t have to crumble under the weight of my own pointless feelings.
He blew out a long breath as the sound of a fully grown man falling to the floor echoed through the door. “I’m gonna kill him. For multiple reasons.”
“Not because he called me fancy, right? Because I have no problem with that.”
Henry forced a smile, but I could see the stress of this evening everywhere I looked. His jaw was rigid, his brow crinkled. Fine pleats pulled at the corners of his midnight eyes and around his mouth. Even though the layers of his coat and sweater, I could feel his thick shoulders drawn tight. If I brought my hand to his neck, I knew I’d find it bunched and corded.
I’d always known Henry was close with his cohort. Honestly, it was hard to miss with all the happy hours, group outings, and whatever the deal was with Tori and Reza’s matching bow ties. But it hadn’t hit me that they’d have a strong reaction to us being together.
“It’s going to be all right.” I pushed some hair from his brow. “Cami, Tori, and Reza adore you. Even if they’ve been temporarily stunned into speechlessness, everything will be back to normal tomorrow.” When he didn’t respond, I added, “I mean, imagine if you saw one of them kissing O’Rourke. You’d be shocked too.”
“Cami’s married, Tori’s gay, and Reza prefers the company of cats to humans.”
“Okay, yes, but you see the point I’m making, right?”
He made a grumbling noise that I interpreted as agreement. Then, “I just don’t want them thinking that—what if they’re looking back on our time in transplant and asking questions. I don’t want to let them down.”
I dropped my palms to his chest. “You’ve had a tough evening and I don’t want to make it worse, but I have to ask if it’s just now occurring to you that the opinions of others—even if they’re unfair or invalid or just wrong—actually matter? Because I think I spent eight solid weeks saying that and it sounds like you’re only coming around to it tonight.”
He stared up at the ceiling as more bumping and stumbling echoed from inside the apartment. “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it that way. I always figured the problems would come from higher up, like the Chief of Surgery. Not from my team.”
I swallowed down my frustration. There were moments when I was force-fed reminders that, while Henry and I were around the same age, I was a decade ahead of him professionally. My understanding of hospital hierarchy and politics was much different than his. “All those times I told you this could end badly for us, I wasn’t just trying to protect myself. I was thinking of you too.”
“Okay, well, I’ve finally figured out what that means. Great. Can we focus on how I fix this now?”
There was a hard bite in his words. I couldn’t decide whether I was getting a dose of my own abrupt, closed-off medicine or he was just overwhelmed by tonight’s events, but I did know I didn’t love being on this side of the equation.
“It seems like you’re really stressed right now,” I said, “and that you need time to process everything. I’m going to assume this isn’t you going into self-destruct mode.”
“Don’t do that.” He dragged his hand down to my waist, holding me so close to him that I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes. “I knew this was going to happen. With Mason. And Florrie, for that matter. She’s been cheating on him for years. I just didn’t think it would happen so fast.”
“She—what?” I took a step back because I needed my hands to talk. “And you let him marry her?”
Henry gave a slow, sad nod. “I told him. He asked her if it was true. She said it wasn’t. You know the rest.”
Understanding hit me all at once. “That’s why you were such a dick at the wedding.”
He slipped his hands into my back pockets with a grimace. “Mmm. Yeah.”
“If you’re going to talk about me, the least you can do is give me back my bourbon,” Mason shouted.
“Not happening,” Henry yelled. “Drink some water, sit down, and be quiet before you make yourself sick. I’m not getting involved if you puke all over the place.”
“It seems like you have your hands full here,” I said. “I should probably go, unless you need the help.”
“I don’t need any help, but—” He dragged a heated gaze over me, stopping somewhere around my collarbones as he stepped closer, ducked his head, pressed his mouth to my neck. “This isn’t how I wanted our night to go.”
He scooped an arm around my backside, boosting me up. My knees went to his hips as he rocked into me, steady and certain like the past hour hadn’t peeled back the lid on all the things we’d tried to ignore. It was almost enough to make me steady and certain too, to make me ignore all the overactive instincts that told me to shore up my defenses and protect myself.
“We’ll leave him here to sleep it off,” Henry continued. “He drank enough to put down an ox and he survives in the wilderness for days on end. How much trouble can he get into?”
Mason let out a ripe string of curses and a groan that made me wince. “You really want to take that chance?”
“Dammit.” He dropped his head to my shoulder, saying, “Wait. Wait a second.” He kissed his way up my neck, along my jaw, over my lips. “Don’t leave here with any of that noise from Mason in your head. And forget about everything I’ve said too. I’m just freaking out a little because these people are like family to me and now I have to explain that I’ve kept a huge secret from them for months.”
“It was the responsible thing to do,” I said.
“Yeah, but responsible and right aren’t always the same things when it comes to the people closest to you.” He kissed both corners of my mouth before sealing his lips over mine. “I’ll walk you home.”
I shook my head as a crash sounded from inside. “You should stay here. I’ll be fine.”
He dropped another kiss on my lips and set me on my feet. “Text me when you get there.”
“I will.” I pushed up on my toes to wrap my arms around his neck and repeated the words he’d said to me months ago. “We’ll get through this. I promise.”
Henry only nodded and walked me down the stairs, his hand on my lower back as if he was steadying himself as much as he was steadying me. He pulled me in for another hug when we reached the sidewalk. “If I don’t hear from you within ten minutes, I’m coming over there.”
He watched me walk away and, as much as I regretted that our night had taken a few hairpin turns, I wasn’t mad about having a few hours alone to figure out what I was thinking. I knew had to chase away the knee-jerk doubts and insecurities that had followed Mason’s comments.
I refused to spend all my time agonizing over whether Henry would wake up some day and decide to drop out of my life. Even if those urges lurked behind too many of my dark corners, it wasn’t going to do me any good. Obsessing like that would leave me no better off than my mother.
As if she knew I was thinking about her, my mother’s name lit up my phone the minute I arrived home. I thought about declining the call because hadn’t this night been dramatic enough? But it was Thanksgiving and she hardly ever reached out, and if I didn’t answer now, it would be on me to call her back in the next few days.
“Hi,” I said, a little cautious because I never knew what to expect from Pearl. That was what she preferred us to call her. Not Mom, but Pearl. She believed we were all old enough to be on a first-name basis now. “How are you?”
“I’m splendid, thank you for asking,” Pearl replied, her tone all warm and buzzing with energy. “I was just thinking about my January Aquarius and how she’s faring in the world today.”
“I’m doing all right. One of my colleagues had an open house tonight, so I went there for the holiday.”
“Oh, that’s right! I totally forgot that some people celebrate Thanksgiving.”
I switched her over to speakerphone while I sent Henry a message. “Yeah, it was good,” I murmured. “What’s new with you? What’s going on in Colorado Springs these days?”
Whitney: I made it home.
“Only the best things, Whitney. Just the very best. I’m leading a soul wellness retreat in Sedona next month,” she said. “And all of my booty bootcamp classes are filled for Q1 of the next year. I’m talking with someone about franchise opportunities.”
One of the things that never failed to amuse me about my mother was that she’d taken a hard turn into the spirituality and wellness arenas after leaving the Air Force, but she did it with the kind of cutthroat business mindset that had her tossing out things like Q1 and franchise opportunities. Like, she was going to pray over rock formations in Arizona and then she was going to diversify the fuck out of her portfolio.
Henry: You had one more minute, young lady, and then I was out the door. Already had my running shoes on.
He attached a photo of his shoes, all laced up as promised. In the far corner of the image sat Mason, his head buried in a bag of chips and a litter of tissues surrounding him. That all seemed about right.
“That’s awesome,” I replied. “Happy for you. Happy that you’ve found something that brings you so much joy.”
“Look at you with the sunny vibes,” she cooed. “I knew there was a reason I needed to speak with you and this is it. Let that be a lesson to you, instincts and energies are never wrong.”
My entire relationship with my mother and sister was a complex game of it’s not the time for that. I’d internalized this to the point I knew without question that I couldn’t tell her that my instincts were byproducts of being bounced around from place to place and being parented by people who weren’t one hundred percent interested in parenting and managing my sister’s healthcare since the age of eleven.
But it wasn’t the time for that. It wasn’t time to mention that I felt like I was tumbling through an upside-down bizarro world tonight because my instincts assumed everyone who paid attention to me for a minute would eventually and abruptly leave, and allow me to believe it was my fault.
I typed out a message that terrified me.
Whitney: Love that about you.
Henry: I hope that’s not ALL you love about me.
My smile was as wide as Acevedo’s holiday pies. I didn’t know what I was doing or why I was tossing these kind of grenades into the conversation tonight, but I knew that was the response I needed.
When my mother finished with her bit about the energy vortices around Sedona, I said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Everything is personal,” she said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t aware of themselves.”
In keeping with the theme, I decided to ask something that terrified me. “What happened with my father?”
After a pause that felt like a tightrope, she said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Another game we liked to play was go ahead and make it worse. Once we were already down the path of disturbing the fragile peace, there was no sense in wasting the opportunity. This was the time to embrace the discomfort and watch while it went down in awkward flames because everyone knew we wouldn’t be coming back to this place again anytime soon.
So, I made it worse. “Why did you go back to him?”
She laughed like sandpaper. “What makes you think he wasn’t the one who came back to me?”
“What made you allow him to come back to you when he’d rejected me?”
In other words, what in the world could this man offer that would excuse his actions?
Whitney: Are you asking for a list?
Henry: I’d be content with some recognition that I go along with all your chicken surgeries despite that fact your success rate with these patients is zero.
Whitney: Okay, yes, if you insist. I love that about you too.
Henry: Good to know since I love everything about you.
These words, they truly were grenades. I felt them land deep in my belly and then explode, the blast radiating all over me.
I heard Pearl moving around, opening and closing doors, running the tap, mixing something. Then, after all that time, all that idle noise, she said, “My only explanation is that love makes people do crazy things. It can even make you ruin your own life.”
A sigh rattled out of me. I knew she heard it and I didn’t care.
I didn’t ask whether she’d ever wondered if she was a making a huge mistake by getting in bed with her commanding officer, if she ever thought about all the other lives involved in that decision. I didn’t ask whether Brie and I ruined her life. I didn’t ask whether she’d called her July Leo tonight—or if she ever called Brie.
It wasn’t the time for that.
“Don’t let me sour you on love and all those exciting things,” Pearl continued. “But just remember that you can only ever trust yourself.”
I’m trying.
She picked up where she’d left off with Sedona and the vortices before digging into the politics surrounding booty bootcamp, and I let her talk without interruption. It seemed to be what she needed.
After saying goodbye to Pearl, I changed into pajamas and went hard with the skincare routine. I stuck to the basics when Henry was here. We were usually so busy talking or pawing at each other that I didn’t want to waste a minute on ice rolling or depuffing masks, but I had all the time in the world tonight.
All the impossible, unanswerable questions too.
And one sweet, sexy surgeon blowing up my phone with the play-by-plays from his apartment.
Henry: We’re banging right through the stages of grief down here. One after the other. Not wasting a minute.
Henry: What am I supposed to do with him tomorrow? I’m in for pre-rounds at 5. Do you know any adult babysitters?
Henry: The damn oaf barely fits on the couch. He’s going to spoon me tonight, isn’t he?
Whitney: What kind of friend are you if you can’t cope with a little cuddling after his marriage fell apart?
Henry: The kind that would rather be spooning you.
Whitney: Your grumpy side is adorable.
Henry: So is yours.
Henry: I don’t know what’s going to happen with my team tomorrow. I know they’re going to want to talk but I don’t know what to say without screwing things up for you.
Whitney: Don’t stress about that. You’ll be too busy tomorrow covering for everyone who’s off for the holiday to talk and I know Cami’s hopping on a train as soon as she can to see her husband. I heard all about it tonight.
Henry: Can we get breakfast on Saturday and figure it out? I’ll probably have to bring Mason with me.
Whitney: I can bring Brie along so he’ll have someone to talk to. She’ll be back tomorrow.
Henry: She’d come?
Whitney: To a free brunch? Yes.
A few minutes passed without a response and I decided to climb into bed. I’d say it was strange being here alone, but I had all kinds of anxieties, insecurities, and trust issues to keep me company.
Even though I was strong and fearless and intimidating on the outside, I was none of those things when I was alone with myself. It didn’t matter how many degrees or board certifications I earned, what I accomplished, how many hearts got a second life in my hands, I was afraid that I’d never be able to shed my old, wounded skin.
As if he knew where my thoughts had gone, my phone pinged with a message from Henry.
Henry: If you’re thinking about the garbage Mason spewed at you tonight, I’m going to put the running shoes back on and jog up the hill to fix that right now.
Henry: Some of those things might’ve been true in the past but they’re not true now.
Henry: You know what you know, Whit, and I love that about you.
Whitney: I wasn’t thinking about it.
Henry: Liar.
Henry: Maybe I should just jog up there to spank you.
Whitney: Maybe you should go to bed because you have pre-rounds in a few hours.
Henry: If you think I’d trade you for sleep, you should know I hardly slept at all when I couldn’t have you. There’s no trade.
Whitney: You’re a resident. You’re not supposed to be sleeping that much anyway.
Henry: Have I mentioned that I love when you’re mean to me?
Whitney: Once or twice, yeah.
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